GATEWAY TO AGILE HappinessEvent

THANK YOU

GERVAIS, ERIC, DAVID

Ø  Gervais Johnson, MATRIX, Western Agile Lead, Empower Agile Adoptions, Transitions and Transformations, 16 Years IBM tenure / Agile Thought Leader

Ø  Eric Mittler, Wells Fargo, Manager for international team supporting Wells Fargo Internet Banking Services, evangelist for Speed to Market

Ø  David Bellamy, CEO of Happiness Lab, focused on workplace happiness and well being of people within hyper-performing organizations

Relevant Certifications: PMP, ACP, CSM, CSP, CSPO, LeSS, SAFe SPC4, ACC, CISP, ICAgile Coach

HAPPINESS = PERFORMANCE AgileEcosystemThread#1

Happiness Science

Work Shop

Debrief

Dark Agile

OUR AGENDA

AGILE ECOSYSTEM

Happiness Thread

HAPPINESS = HIGHER PERFORMANCE

Definition of Done Definition of Fun

Jeff Sutherlands paper ‘Teams That Finish Early Accelerate Faster’

Happier People are 12 % More Productive

You Improve What You Measure

Why focus on Happiness

“I want the best version of our employees to show up every day” everyone

Engaged or Happy?

Success, leads to happiness, right?

We’ll be so happy when we’re done! We send rewards, praise & bonuses at the end. We take vacations after we finish.

What defines your happiness?

What happens when we’re happier?

43% greater productivity (Hay Group)

33% higher profitability (Gallup)

37% increase in sales (Shawn Achor - Harvard)

300% more innovative (HBR)

51% lower staff turnover (Gallup)

66% lower sick leave (Forbes)

125% less burnout (HBR)

…and it’s not just about work

“…Happy individuals are successful across multiple life domains, including marriage, friendship, income, work performance, and health.”

- S. Lyubomirsky

So we’re measuring happiness

Understanding happiness and working to improve it will help companies, teams and the individuals within them

it’s win, win, win.

Transforming performance through happiness

www.HappinessLab.com

@happiness_guy

Eric Mittler Tech Manager MA Psychology UMN

The How of Happiness?

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Assumption: You want to succeed and improve. Right?

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How do you feel?

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If you are not taking that question seriously, you are likely underperforming

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How does your team feel?

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Really? Have you asked?

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What are you doing about it?

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A lesson from Cooperative Learning

Positive Psychology

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What’s the secret to increasing team

happiness?

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Answer:

Experiment & Iterate

WHAT IS HAPPINESS? •  Eudaimonia

word commonly translated as happiness or welfare; however, "human flourishing" has been proposed as a more accurate translation. - Wikipedia

•  Joyful, Delighted, Smiling

•  Challenged without being Stressed Out

•  Feeling Good, Untroubled, Comfortable

•  Empowered - A Manageable amount of Stress

Stress

Big Super Important Delivery Day!

Confidence

Consider People’s Feelings in the Process

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Emot

ion

Emot

ion

★  Celebrating micro deliveries

★  Criticism is from people who care

★  Rapid corrective action promotes feelings of safety.

Victory! Celebration Celebration Celebration

Stress

Success

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PRACTICAL SOLUTIONS

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Experiment!!! Please don’t use Waterfall to adopt Agile.

Continuity. You need a team that sticks together.

Attain an Agile Mindset�(Linda Rising - http://lindarising.org)

EXPERIMENT: STAND UP @ STAND UP

•  Literally stand up (one leg?)

•  Try alternative delivery methods (sing/cartoon)

•  Be Present, In Person (or on video)

•  Say 4 things: 1) what you did, 2) what you will be doing, 3) What blockers you have, 4) Something cool you saw someone else doing

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Pull up! You’re gonna crash!

Why: Stand-ups move faster making team happier. People will smile more. Problematic/confrontations are made eaiser

EXPERIMENT: PASS THE BATON

•  At major ceremonies (Iteration Planning or Retrospective), practice “passing the baton”

•  Cookie rotation

•  When finished speaking, pick the next speaker by looking that next person in the eye and say “Vijay, so how do you feel?”

•  Only the person with the Groucho Marx glasses gets to speak.

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Why: Making meetings fun. Make measuring affect a natural part of the process.

EXPERIMENT: LEVEL UP!

•  Pair on everything!

•  Rotate pairs every stand up

•  Pick stories — never assign them! It’s more fun to race to pick a story than to have someone assign it to you. Just stop using the word “assign” or “assignment”

•  If you don’t know how to do it, you are in charge. Only have novice people own Stories or Tasks that they do not know how to do. Then the expert, who does know, is put in charge of making sure the novice succeeds.

Why

•  Creates a supportive social environment.

•  It’s OURS not MINE alleviates stress.

•  The act of rotating/variety is fun.

•  Having people compete to get to a story rather than a PM assign a story is a more happy state.

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EXPERIMENT: HEAT MAPS IN RETRO

•  Agile teams write retro comments on red cards

•  One observation per card

•  Use the card color to indicate how you feel

•  Voilà insta-heat map

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Why Coders are often shy to say how they feel. Get a metric without much work & without being anonymous.

EXPERIMENT: GAMES & BREAK TIME

•  Encourage team to take an hour or TWO to play

•  Get a ping pong table

•  Have a chess board out

•  Dominion! by Rio Grande FTW

•  Get a video game console

•  Geek out

•  Have a public leader board

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Why: Playing games, doing puzzles & sports INCREASES happiness, productivity, and the desire to be present.

EXPERIMENT: STUPID NAMES

•  Name your servers, projects, code names something stupid

•  Nick names (can be self picked) for people

•  Sum up your iteration or epic with a stupid code name (can be done mid iteration)

•  Inside jokes the leadership team doesn’t understand.

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Why: Make some future teammate unexpectedly laugh. Build a team culture. Make sure you are always respectful.

EXPERIMENT: PRAISE & COMPLIMENTS

•  In retrospective force grumpy people to assert 5 cool things that happen are allowed to voice a criticism

•  A “cool thing” can be anything, can be silly or even gallows humor

•  This will skew your heat map, but you can do math.

•  Encourage an atmosphere of gratitude

•  Ask why others cannot do that cool thing too

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Why Praising others makes one feel good internally. It is nearly impossible to both wish someone well and wish them ill at the same time.

EXPERIMENT: NO DUE DATES OR COMMITMENTS

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•  Continuous Delivery Instead of Due Dates •  Commit to working hard = Happy •  Committing to completing a task on a due date = Stress •  Use math to predict feature completion

WHY •  Committing to task completion on a specific date is stressful and naturally

results committing to the least amount of work e.g. Slow to Market.

•  Committing to work hard or harder than before, is empowering and happier

EXPERIMENT: SAY PEOPLE’S NAMES

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Why: Hearing your name engages you makes you feel included and happier

•  Encourage everyone to learn everyone else name

•  Practice the pronunciation of everyone’s name

•  Learn something about everyone on your team

EXPERIMENT: BREAK DOWN HIERARCHIES

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Why: DevOps logic. Over time the team will all be raised up. Empowerment is a key to happiness

•  Empower everyone

•  Rotate leadership. Have novices lead

•  Senior people do not lead!!!

•  Senior people are in charge of ensuring novices succeed or fail gracefully

EXPERIMENT: TECHIE TOYS

•  Your coders should have kick ass laptops, two HD monitors and the fastest network connection possible. Certainly better than what they have at home.

•  Telepresence robotic flying drones

•  WiFi enabled expresso machines

•  you get the idea

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Why: Techies love environments that…wait for it…have tech

EXPERIMENT: INNOVATION SPIKES

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Why This engages & motivates Techies. Team discovers new better ways to work. Fosters happier teams.

•  Have special stories in your backlog to research new tech

•  Have special days when you go off your iteration stories to explore new tech

•  Have moon shot projects that you expect to fail

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Practical Experimentation Themes

Note these themes in the suggested experiments

1.  Being Physical/Kenetic vs stationary

2.  Alternative & Alternating Communications

3.  Being Present rather than Virtual

4.  Adding Variety

5.  Increasing joy in others & respect

6.  Gamification

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All this stuff is just “nice to have.”

Work is not supposed to be fun.

I’ll wait until management tells me to be happy.

I don’t care about success.

This will never work.

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Assumption: You want to succeed and improve. Right? Or are you just waiting to be told what to do?

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How do you feel?

cool cats code

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Questions &

Answers Discovery

POWER START •  P = Purpose

•  O = Outcome

•  W = WIIFM

•  E = Energize and Engage

•  R = Roles/Responsibilities

WORKSHOP TEAMS

Chief of Happiness

Chief of Customer

Facilitators

Facilitator: Answer Work Shop Instructions, Gets Help

Chief Agile Officer

WORKSHOP DETAILS

TEAM SCENARIO The team is not performing optimally, the Burn Down Chart, Velocity, and other management reporting is showing poor performance in all categories, thus causing unhappiness within the team and leadership. The team morale is low and the last retrospective illustrated very low Team Health.

Workshop Summary:   Objectives to demonstrate how to determine individual and team happiness and to come up with experiments to improve team health and specifically the happiness level We will use the Retrospective format for team discussion and coming up with the 3 experiments The team will present their results to the entire audience

Under performing team members Half of the team members has low motivation and morale due to stress at work

One member has low motivation and moral due to issues at home

Changing and volatility of success criteria

During the last 2 Sprints the success criteria of 50% of the Stories selected are changing

During the last 3 Sprints the success criteria of 20% of the Stories selected are insufficient

UNRELAISTIC DEMANDS (MICRO-MANAGING)

Since the beginning the Business executive has been demanding more completion of Stories per Sprint than what we have indicated can be done Over the last 2 Sprints the Product Owner keeps wanting to add Stories in the middle of the Sprint and does not take No for an answer Product Owner is not present during the Sprint Review

 

WORKSHOP DETAILS

Each team will DESIGN at least 3 EXPERIMENTS to address the low Team Health and improve CONDITIONS OF TEAM HEALTH AND HAPPINESS. We are looking for Story level details. The team will present the 3 Experiments to the audience where they will be rated using the Happiness Lab

 

Team Presentation

 

Each team will present their 3 EXPERIMENTS to the audience.  

WORKSHOP DEBRIEF

Experiences Wow Moments Feelings Follow-up

UNDER THE HOOD OF HAPPINESS LAB

Feb 22, Wednesday 6 – 8 PM 601 Montgomery St Suite 650

UNHAPPY TEAMS = DARK AGILE

DARK AGILE HappinessTherapy

MORE HAPPINESS = MORE AGILE

Barriers to Agile Adoption can be torn down with happiness

AGILE ECOSYSTEM Dark Agile is created by improper alignment and care of your Agile Ecosystem AND Unhappiness

DARK AGILE PATTERNS

Technocentrics

Self-Absorbed

Augmented Reality

Laissez-Faire Grand Unified Theory

TECHNOCENTRICS

Too much Focus on Agile Practices and Tools Individual Collective (Limited) Interior

SELF-ABSORBED

Too much Focus on Agile Practices and Tools + Agile Humanity All Individual Interior

AUGMENTED REALITY

Little or No Focus on Organization and Culture & Environment Individual Collective (Selective) Interior

LAISSEZ-FAIRE

Insufficient Focus or Alignment Across Quadrants Individual + Collective Interior + Exterior Minimalist

GRAND UNIFIED THEORY

Too Much Focus on Each Quadrants, No Synchronicity Individual + Collective Interior + Exterior Extermist

GATEWAY TO AGILE RoadmapandInterestsGroups

ROADMAP

GRAND CHALLENGE

Team to organize and operate grand challenge Prize $TBD

EVENT COORDINATION

Team to help with Meetup and Events

SPONSOR MANAGEMENT

Team to help with Sponsors

THANK YOU TasteofScrumatFirstRepublicBankNext